“The first call people make to the show is often their first admission that they’ve got a problem and I really believe that we can do something for them.

“Some people will say that it’s sensationalist radio, but that’s not giving full credit to the listeners. To hear that someone else has experienced the same kind of difficulty is part of the healing process.”

At the time he was living in Banbury, so I asked him if he ever got depressed during that long drive home if some of the calls have been particularly heart-rending – like the teenage girl who’d lost three pregnancies due to physical violence and given birth to her fourth child prematurely?

“I try to think about the positive things that we are doing and that long drive home helps me to unwind,” he said. “We always try to follow things up and I got a letter back from this girl after she’d had her baby, thanking me.

“She’d called her baby James after the first letter of my name.”

Reading between the unspoken lines of our chat at Broad Street’s Hyatt Hotel, I concluded my interview thus: ‘With his clean-cut looks, persuasive charm and broadcast manner, it’s not hard to imagine Jezza aiming for a TV career, but, for now, it’s not one of his stated ambitions’.

Kyle left Birmingham for Manchester’s Century Radio in the late summer of 2000 and won a Sony Award for new show Late & Live in 2001.

By then, he’d already begun dating BRMB’s Two Strangers and a Wedding stunt bride Carla Germaine, who had split up from husband Greg Cordell after just three months.

A former salesman, Reading-born Kyle married Germaine in 2002 and they have three children together. He also has a daughter from a short-lived previous marriage in 1989.

in his 2009 autobiography I’m Only Being Honest he admitted to having a compulsive disorder problem, writing: “I get up and mop the kitchen floor at 2am. I lick my mobile phone to make sure it’s clean — I know it’s disgusting.

“I did lick golf balls too until somebody told me a guy in America who did that died because of the pesticides.”

An ITV spokeswoman said: “We wish Jeremy well and are pleased that he is making such good progress.

“We hope that he is back on his feet soon and look forward to him returning to work when he is ready.”